New York Times

Leaked information — its uses and abuses — lies at the heart of the current episode of Retro Report, a series of essays and video documentaries that study major news stories of the past and how they influence events today. Presidents themselves have long encouraged seepage when it suits their purposes, as the New York Times columnist James Reston observed decades ago. “The ship of state,” he said, “is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.” It is when unauthorized disclosures put them on the spot that leaders start wailing.

Republican lawmakers moved to dismantle landmark internet privacy protections for individuals, the first decisive strike against telecommunications and technology regulations created during the Obama administration and a harbinger for more deregulation to come.

In a 50-to-48 vote largely along party lines, the Senate Republican majority voted to overturn the privacy rules, which had been created in October by the Federal Communications Commission. The move means a company like Verizon or Comcast can continue tracking and sharing people’s browsing and app activity without asking their permission. An individual’s data collected by these companies also does not need to be secured with “reasonable measures” against hackers. The privacy rules, which had sought to address these issues, were scheduled to go into effect at the end of 2017. The vote begins a repeal of those regulations. Next week, the House is expected to mirror the Senate’s action through the same Congressional Review Act procedure that allows Congress to overturn new agency rules. The House is expected to pass the resolution, which would then move to President Donald Trump to sign.

Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of a House panel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, may have dealt his own inquiry a fatal blow.

Armed with intelligence that some Republicans said bolstered President Trump’s widely disputed claim of being wiretapped by the Obama administration, Chairman Nunes bypassed Democrats and went directly to the White House. The new information, Chairman Nunes said, showed that American intelligence agencies monitoring foreign officials may have “incidentally” picked up communications of Trump transition team members. The move angered Democrats who said that Nunes’s attempt to buttress Trump’s accusation raised questions about his ability to conduct an impartial bipartisan investigation. The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA), issued a challenge, saying that Chairman Nunes had to decide whether he was chairman of an independent investigation or “is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both.”

Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington.

According to a new white paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American start-ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China’s military capacity as well as its economy. The white paper, which was distributed to the senior levels of the Trump administration this week, concludes that United States government controls that are supposed to protect potentially critical technologies are falling short, according to three people knowledgeable about its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

[Commentary] The cultural-political revolution of the Nixon era was neither televised nor sponsored. If you listen to the coolest protest anthem ever, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott-Heron, you’ll hear that it was not “brought to you by Xerox,” did not “go better with Coke,” did not have stars like Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or the entertainment value of “Green Acres.”

The Trump era’s #Resistance is flipping all of that on its head. It’s being televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped. It doesn’t yet go better with Coke. But it does go better with a good night’s sleep in Parachute sheets, a slick new web page designed with Squarespace and an affordable shave with Harry’s razors — bearded Bernie bros notwithstanding. Just go check out an episode of “Pod Save America,” one of the big breakout hits of the nascent resistance movement. Running twice weekly, it has all of the above-named brands and sponsors, stars several members of former President Barack Obama’s inner circle and seeks to entertain as much as it tries to inspire anti-Trump action.

The dairy farmer in Halcott (NY), a town about 140 miles north of New York City, was one of the first beneficiaries of an ambitious initiative to extend broadband to every household in the state by 2018 — no matter how rural or far-flung the address — which would make New York the first state to reach that high-speed internet milestone. For years, this town was like many isolated spots in New York and across the country, left sitting on the shoulders of the digital highway unable to access the broadband speeds that so many businesses and households count on. But now under a state-led program, towns like Halcott, with fewer than 300 residents, are getting wired, giving residents faster access to the internet and opening new opportunities for businesses. Under Gov Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) “Broadband for All” initiative, New York’s program is one of the most aggressive broadband expansions in the country, and is designed to help stem any losses a private company incurs through what is known as a reverse auction process.

One secret to longevity as a pundit is to issue predictions that can’t be easily checked. So here’s one for the time capsule: Two hundred years from now, give or take, the robot-people of Earth will look back on the early years of the 21st century as the beginning of a remarkable renaissance in art and culture. That may sound unlikely to many of us in the present. In the past few decades, we’ve seen how technology has threatened the old order in cultural businesses, including the decimation of the music industry, the death of the cable subscription, the annihilation of newspapers and the laying to waste of independent bookstores. But things are turning around; for people of the future, our time may be remembered as a period not of death, but of rejuvenation and rebirth.

Britain asked regulators on March 16 to investigate whether 21st Century Fox’s $14.3 billion deal to take full control of the British satellite television giant Sky would give the media mogul Rupert Murdoch too much control over the country’s media landscape. The takeover for the 61 percent of Sky that 21st Century Fox does not already own was agreed on in December and is the second such effort to combine the two companies since 2011. The latest attempt quickly raised a wave of criticism in Britain, where Murdoch already holds several media interests. Along with the investigation in Britain, the merger is expected to face a review by antitrust regulators in the European Union.

Even if President Trump’s wiretap claim was groundless, as seems all but certain, it has unexpectedly renewed a debate on the left as well as the right over whether security agencies invade Americans’ privacy and could undermine democracy.

Whether the president intended such a discussion or even welcomes it, his repeated undercutting of the spy agencies has been striking. Some of his vocal critics believe that the wiretap gambit is a deliberate attempt to create a distraction from the many challenges facing his young presidency. It could also be that by pre-emptively discrediting the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, he is hoping to undermine any damning evidence they may produce of his associates’ contacts with Russia. In the domestic sphere, after all, he and his aides denigrated the Congressional Budget Office in anticipation of the office’s dismal projections on his health plan. Or possibly the president’s repeated battering of the intelligence agencies is not so different from his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. He may view the spy agencies as just additional targets in what his adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

These days, even a labor strike can be corporatized and repurposed as public relations. The typical refrain from brands that take on a cause is that they are “using their platform” to “raise awareness” about an issue. But the internet has complicated the transaction. Modern news audiences are bombarded with too much information, and right now, it all seems to be news for or against President Donald Trump. Brands that enter the fray aren’t so much “raising awareness” as they are jostling for their own messaging to be seen amid the rush of signals.

President Trump’s election has sparked great interest in civic engagement — joining community groups, organizing protests, showing up at town hall meetings. The resistance brand presents another option: Buy this thing, not the other. Is that the kind of awareness that needs to be raised?